Velvel on National Affairs

This progressive blog sets forth the personal views of the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law on national events. Occasionally, the responses to his views or other interesting articles are also posted.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Re: Of John Roberts, Ben Stein, Richard Posner and George Bush.

Dear Colleagues:This post shall discuss a potpourri of subjects that have no necessary logical connection, but nonetheless can be connected, and in this writer’s mind are connected by free association.

It is clear that, barring something wholly unforeseen, John Roberts is going to be confirmed by the Senate. Even Democratic Senators of whom one might never have thought it – Leahy, Finegold and Kohl -- voted for him in Committee. As remarked here before, people of my acquaintance think very highly of him, and his appearance before Congress made it clear to all that he is smarter than Hades, well spoken and charming, not to mention possessed of great stamina and patience.

Frankly, though one gathers that many Senators on the Judiciary Committee considered the entire matter to be, and treated it as being, one of utmost importance, to watch the hearing was largely to watch a highly knowledgeable intellect overmaster a bunch of windbags. That some of the Senators -- oppositely to Senator Sessions, for example -- may have had justice and decency on their side did not alter the impression one received. They were overmatched. One against eight were pretty good odds for Roberts.

In a way, though, one can hardly blame the Senators, windbag politicians though they are. For they were trying to take on, on his own turf, an expert in a huge field. They might have known more about Roberts’ field than they would know about string theory, for example, but their level of knowledge and their ability to manipulate the concepts were still infinitely less than Roberts’. They were often reduced to spluttering generalities.

Though Roberts overmatched his interlocutors by light years, his victory was no victory for "the better angels of our nature." At least not now, although only God knows what the future will hold. It was, rather, a victory for some of the less desirable aspects of our judicial and political systems. As discussed here previously, and for the reasons given then, Roberts acted very unethically by continuing to sit on the Guantanamo case while he was being repeatedly interviewed by high administration figures with regard to a potential, and then an actual, Supreme Court opening. If there is one thing Roberts could not have failed to know, it is that a decision contrary to the administration’s ardent wishes in the Guantanamo case would doom any hope of appointment to the Supreme Court. Yet he continued to sit on the case. This was shameful, not to mention infuriating to anyone with a sense of ethical decency. (If you wish to read this last remark as an implication that in this instance, at least, Roberts lacked even rudimentary ethical decency, feel free. Such seems all too typical, moreover, of this generation of administration Republicans, who seem to feel they are anointed by God to bring back values and thus may permissibly do whatever they wish, however wrong lesser mortals may think their actions.)

Roberts’ victory in the Judiciary Committee was also a victory for that bane of decent government (and decent corporate and other behavior), secrecy. In every human endeavor, secrecy is the fount and nutrient of evil -- which is why Brandeis said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Here the administration -- as is its wont -- refused to turn over documents, and Roberts often refused to say what he thought about issues in past cases. Such issues might come before him in the future, after all, and he would not want a litigant to think its’ case was prejudged. Or so we were told.

The last argument is, it seems, an oft given excuse. It is quite surprising to me that nobody seems ever to have brought forth the obvious and inarguable responses. To wit: "Well, Judge, after you have written (or even merely joined) your first opinion on the matter, all subsequent litigants will know what you think, and can equally feel prejudged. So why shouldn’t you tell us now what you think? You will be no more or less free to change your mind after further consideration than after your first opinion. And if your current opinion is merely tentative, you can tell us that too, and you will be even freer to change your mind than after your first opinion, because the latter is a legal precedent."

Sometimes, of course, a nominee is, like Roberts, already a judge, and may have opined on an issue as a judge, may have opined beyond the usual excuse, often bushwa, of "Supreme Court precedent made me do it." When this is so, future litigants on the issue will know what the judge already thinks. So, once again, why shouldn’t someone know what a Roberts thinks?

These points are all so obvious that one wonders why they seem never to have been written about. (Or have they, but I don’t know it?)

Roberts’ victory is also a defeat for another idea, a most unpopular one, however. When asked whether he believed some of the abominable stuff he wrote in the Reagan administration, Roberts kept ducking the question by saying it had to be remembered that he was working for certain people, e.g., William French Smith. Well, who said he had to work for those people? If he didn’t agree with them, why did he work for them? He was, after all, a top graduate of Harvard Law School, and a former Supreme Court Clerk. He could have had gazzillions of prestigious -- and high paying -- jobs. If he worked for W.F. Smith, Reagan, etc. while disagreeing with the abominable views in his memos, he should be censured.

That this seems to have occurred to hardly anyone -- except Nancy Grace and Ted Kennedy -- is a measure of the extent to which people’s minds have been taken over by the evil concept that a lawyer merely represents a client and should say whatever may work on the client’s behalf. It is also a measure of the extent to which careerism uber alles, represented here by saying what one assumedly did not believe, has become the dominating American creed.

Of course, in reality nobody believes (do they?) Roberts’ attempt to elide his prior nasty comments by implicitly claiming that he was merely representing his bosses’ views. It is pretty certain that he damned well did believe what he wrote -- and that that was why he wrote it -- and is now either seeking to escape the consequences of what he said and believed then or seeking to signal a possible change in views without owning up to what he believed and said. Or both. Yet, no matter which, each alternative is a form of careerism, is it not, and, in this respect, not a whit removed from continuing to sit on a case of vital importance to, and deciding in favor of, those who are passing on his nomination?

For those Democrats on the Judiciary Committee -- Leahy, Finegold and Kohl -- who voted in favor of Roberts, their votes represent a triumph of hope over common human experience. As Alan Dershowitz said on television during the hearings, a judge’s political views invariably govern his constitutional ones. Or to put it differently, constitutional views invariably comport with political ones. (Anything else might cause unbearable cognitive dissonance.) There are not many like Holmes, you see. And nobody has yet accused John Roberts of being a political liberal. Leahy, Finegold and Kohl are simply hoping against hope that Roberts won’t turn out to be a political reactionary today and tomorrow, as he apparently was in the early 1980s.

There was one matter about Roberts’ background that, as far as I know, never came out at the hearings. Roberts grew up, as was occasionally pointed out in the media, in a town called Long Beach, Indiana. Long Beach is part of the Indiana lakeshore (Lake Michigan’s eastern shore), in a general area of northwestern Indiana and southwestern Michigan that includes Michigan City, St. Joe, and Benton Harbor, as well as smaller villages and communities like New Buffalo, Union Pier, Lakeside, Michiana Shores and South Haven. If my memory from the 1940s and 1950s is correct, all or some of this is located around, at least roughly speaking, what are known as the Indiana Dunes.

When I was a small kid growing up in Chicago in the mid and late 1940s, my family used to drive to that part of Indiana for vacations. We would pass through Long Beach, and, again if memory serves, my parents would point out the large house of another Leahy, Frank Leahy, the great Notre Dame football coach. And, at least among "my people," so to speak, Long Beach was thought to be an anti-Semitic place. Certainly there had been, around World War II, Bund activity around the general northern Indiana/southern Michigan lake shore area. For those too young to know about such things, the German-American Bund was a pro-Hitler, pro Nazi, antisemitic organization.

Now, unless my memory or the information it contains are wrong, or unless there were dramatic changes of which I’ve not heard, John Roberts grew up in an area and among views that, to put it mildly, could not be described as left wing, or liberal, or politically correct. (Forgive the sarcasm.) One wonders what effect this had on him, and one is not comforted in this respect by the things he wrote while in the Reagan Department of Justice. (And what did he write, that Bush will not let us see, when in the Solicitor General’s Office?)

To be sure, the last thing in the world that one wants to say, the last accusation in the world that one wants to level, is that Roberts is a bigot. At Harvard College, at the Harvard Law School, in Washington, D.C., and in his well known law firm, Roberts has been in contact with, has been practically inundated by one might guess, large numbers of Jewish Americans, and has known, probably to an ever increasing extent, African Americans. Except for some of the language of his early memos, I know of no actual evidence even to suspect him of bigotry, and the diverse company he likely has kept certainly argues against it. Yet, unless my memory or the information of those long ago days of the 1940s is wrong, or unless there was a great change in the milieu, the views that likely surrounded Roberts in his youth give pause when he refuses to answer questions relating to the welfare of minorities. It gives rise to fear that, God forbid, the hope for Roberts implicit in the votes of Leahy, Finegold and Kohl could prove to be a triumph of hope over sense and experience. But let us hope not.

* * * * *

As one pundit put it during the Roberts’ hearings, Roberts shows that one born to privilege can rise to power. Of course, we already knew that, didn’t we? Viz. John F. Kennedy and the two Georges Bush. The lives of such people, especially the life of the drunken, serial corporate failure/playboy who became President, contrast dramatically with a situation that was described by Ben Stein in a New York Times’ article of January 30th -- by the Ben Stein of "Win Ben Stein’s Money," which is pretty hard to do because he is awfully smart.

Stein is an accomplished guy, being a lawyer, writer, actor, economist and television personality, with a regular Sunday article in the Sunday Business Section of The Times. In the article of January 30th he tells of career advice he received from his father, circa 1958. He makes plain that his father was in a position to know whereof he spoke, because he was director of research, and wrote papers on tax, trade, labor policy and other major issues for the Committee For Economic Development, and "knew the top people in business in the nation at the time," albeit "not as a social equal" though "he was at least their intellectual and moral equal." "And he did know the world." Stein’s father, you see, though Stein does not say so in this particular article, was Mort Stein, who later became head of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisors.

Stein wrote the article to show how much the American world has changed since 1958, when he talked to his father about possible careers. Today, says Stein, we have made "stunning, unbelievable moral progress. It is a whole new world, a new universe of equality of opportunity." "Every job in every field is open to everyone," he continues, "with perhaps a very few exceptions" -- a statement which strikes me as quite an overstatement, although one takes his general point. Women and blacks run large corporations, Stein says, "Jews are hired at law firms that would not have let them in the door during my youth, except as tailors," and are "the heads of industrial corporations where they would not have been considered for interviews in 1958." Asians and Hispanics "are rising everywhere," Asians in technology especially and Hispanics "in the media, law and other fields."

But it was not ever thus, and it was not thus in 1958 when Stein sought his father’s advice on a career. Mort Stein asked 13 year old Ben "what careers I was interested in." "‘Well, I love cars, and I think I’d like to work at General Motors or, even better, Ford.’" Mort Stein told him to forget it. "‘Actually, Benjy, auto companies don’t really take Jews in executive positions.’"

Asked to make another choice, 13 year old Ben said "‘maybe advertising. I like the idea of working on commercials.’" Forget it, said Mort. "‘I have to tell you that Madison Avenue doesn’t really take Jews either, or at least not much.’"Ben then said maybe banking. "‘That’s a neat place to work.’" "Now my father looked really unhappy. ‘They really don’t take Jews at a high level or even a low level either at the big banks,’ he said."

"It was a sobering conversation for a 13-year-old and, as you can tell, I remembered it vividly."

"That was the business world then -- highly restricted against Jews. And locked absolutely tight against blacks, unless they were washroom attendants or manual laborers. (The junior high school I attended, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, had been desegregated only 18 months earlier.) For women, there was the world of typists and receptionists. Asians and Hispanics were hardly a business afterthought. That was it in free, white America in 1958. It was a white Christian men’s club, and it was not that long ago."

Well, this writer, being about five or six years older than Ben Stein, and like him born of Jews, grew up in that world and well remembers it. One remembers that there were hotels one could not go to, restaurants where one could not eat, universities -- especially some Ivy League ones, whose graduates practically run the country for God’s sake -- where one’s chance of admission was quite low, fraternities that would not consider you, law firms galore that would neither interview nor hire you though you were in the very top part of your class at a major law school (while Christians in the middle of the class were inundated with offers), and practically a whole country that scorned you as being part of a people who, contrary to the American ethos, were thought to generally be small, weak and non-athletic -- which is a reason why lots of Jews of my generation thanked God every day for the martial, and therefore inevitably physical, example of the mailed fist of the Israeli army and air force.

I have written extensively of all this in Misfits In America, and shall not repeat most of it here. But I remember it well, and not without some real bitterness. For while America fooled fools like me with its pretense that in the United States all things are possible for, and all obstacles can be surmounted by, anyone who is intelligent and works hard, the truth was quite different, and still is. There were outside, artificial limits on sons of immigrants, on Jews, on blacks, on women, and all the intelligence and hard work in the world could not surmount those limits.There are people who tell me that anger is misplaced because, they say, one has done fairly well. And I would certainly say that Ben Stein has done very well. One would also say, with Ben Stein, that today the situation is infinitely better than in 1958, so that today a far smaller percentage of the population faces what people of our generation faced and are subject to artificial limits that were placed on us. Yet, as Stein conceded, "Of course we [still] have problems." Given our history, and given that we still have problems, there are lots of people who fear John Roberts, this son of Long Beach, this scion of Long Beachian privilege who will not answer questions relating to whether he will seek to continue the forward march Ben Stein speaks of so ardently, or will instead seek to turn back the clock to the days of Long Beach in the middle of the 20th century.

In an article about John Roberts in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books, William Taylor asks the "intriguing question" of why did this "young person whose success in life was virtually assured by family wealth and academic achievement . . . enlist in a political campaign designed to deny opportunities for success to those who lacked his advantages? It is a question of great relevance to Roberts’s candidacy for the Supreme Court. As the late Charles Black has written, no serous person is under the illusion that ‘a judge’s judicial work is not influenced . . . by his sense, sharp or vague, of where justice lies in respect to the great issues of his time.’" We do not know the answer to Taylor’s "intriguing question." And, with fine irony, the three Democrats who are taking a fling on Roberts without knowing the answer -- Finegold, Kohl and Leahy -- include two Jews, the people whose limited opportunities not so long ago were written of by Ben Stein, and a descendant of the Irish, a people against whom discrimination was so deeply bitter and greatly prolonged when they immigrated to this country in the 1840s and 1850s that they were portrayed as monkeys in cartoons throughout most of the remainder of the 19th Century. One wonders if these three Senators have forgotten where they came from now that they personally are big deals politically.

Of course, many would say that it is a measure of the greatness of this country, of the opportunities it provides, that these three can forget where they came from in deciding on John Roberts. Personally, I prefer the wisdom of Santayana. One is not aware that history has as yet overthrown his dictum.

* * * * *

Richard Posner is a conservative, but a most interesting contrast to John Roberts.Though I did not meet him at the time, I first heard of Posner when he came to the Solicitor General’s Office of the Department of Justice circa 1965 or so and I was writing Supreme Court briefs in the Appellate Section of the Antitrust Division of the Department. He quickly became legendary for the speed and therefore the extent of his work. It was a bittersweet joke told by other members of the Solicitor General’s Office that Posner, due to his speed, not only was doing his own work, but was taking over everyone else’s work in the office, too.

Posner, you see, typed. Today, when everyone seems to type (except Alan Dershowitz (and me)), it may be hard for most people to understand the great advantage possessed in those days by the few lawyers who knew how to type. Let me tell you a story that further illustrates this point.

Two years ahead of me in law school was a young man named James Adler. In those days, when an A was the highest grade one could get in a course at the Michigan Law School (whether this is still true today I do not know), Adler graduated with a straight A average, a perfect 4.0 average. (He was also editor-in-chief of the law review.) To the best of my knowledge, graduating with a straight A, or straight 4.0, average at the Michigan law School was unheard of in those days. For all I know, Adler may have been the only person who ever did so up until then, and I suppose it is possible he still may be (unless one can get A pluses these days, which would count for 4.3). A handful of extraordinarily bright people were known to have graduated with approximately 3.9 averages over the years, but a straight 4.0? Impossible. But Adler did it.

Adler must have had some kind of truly unusual mind. Coming along two years after him, I once bought a used casebook that had his name written in it as the prior student owner. There was not a mark in the book -- no underlining, no check marks, nothing. There was also a story around the school that Adler had gotten a score of about 187 or 189 or something like that on a test on which the next highest score was about a 148 -- the score of a fellow who himself graduated with a very unusual average of about 3.8 or 3.9. Yet another story around the school was that a final exam in tax law had had three questions. The third question asked whether the answer to question two would change if, instead of facts A and B, you substituted facts C and D. Adler’s answer, it was said, was one word: no. Looking at that question in the library’s file of old exams two years later, it was obvious that the answer was no. But with a 4.0 average possibly on the line, who could have had the guts, the confidence, to simply write the one word, no, without any explanation of why the answer was no? According to the story, Adler did.

So Adler obviously was a young man of truly unusual intellectual gifts. And, adding to his gifts, he had one other advantage, the same one Posner did. He typed. He typed his exams at a time when very few others did. Without taking anything away from Adler’s truly unusual mental gifts, any law professor can tell you that a typed, and therefore easy to read exam, starts with an advantage when being graded. It has an advantage over a quickly written, often difficult to read handwritten test no matter how smart or knowledgeable the scribbling writer may be.

We used to jokingly say that, given Adler’s grade point average, any professor who did not give him an A would feel compelled to reexamine his grading. And given that Adler was one of only a precious few who typed his exams, it would have been hard, after Adler’s freshman year and his remarkable 4.0 average that year, not to know which exam paper was his even though we put numbers, not our names, on tests. But be all this as it may, Adler obviously had truly unusual gifts.

So, as the Adler story further illustrates, that he was able to type gave Posner a leg up in the Solicitor General’s Office in the mid ’60s. But he too, like Adler, possesses unusual gifts, and decades later, when everyone typed (except perhaps Alan Dershowitz (and this writer)), Posner was still producing far more work than anyone else (with Dershowitz perhaps being the only one who is even within hailing distance in certain respects).

At some point Posner left Washington, D.C.. He was at Stanford Law School briefly, and then settled in at the University of Chicago Law School, where he created -- I think created is a fair word for it -- the law and economics movement and, I believe, started a consulting firm as well as taught and wrote. Then he went on the federal bench as part of Reagan’s conservative movement, a movement one thinks in the overall lamentable notwithstanding that it brought someone like Posner to the bench, and a movement for which the country is paying and will continue to pay notwithstanding all the supportive conservative propaganda of the last 25 years from so many think tanks, professors and politicians.

I have to regretfully admit that, for a considerable period, this blogger thought of Posner as simply one of Reagan’s conservative henchmen, since he is reasonably conservative, and seems to see most things in light of and to explain them by means of abstract, bloodless economic principles. But I began to change my mind drastically about 12 years ago when I read two 1993 articles by Posner. In one, which was later incorporated into one of his books, Posner lambasted a very famous, oft cited 1959 Harvard Law Review article by Herbert Wechsler on so-called "neutral principles" of constitutional adjudication. Without getting into all the ins and outs of the "neutral principles" argument, suffice it to say that Wechsler’s view treated the real world consequences of constitutional adjudication as being more or less irrelevant. That a decision be consonant with prior ones as a matter of abstract legal logic divorced from real world results was, rather, the desideratum, even if this meant we would have racial discrimination or other evils. This idea was outrageous to me as a believer in social justice who had not had this idea exorcized even by three years at the conservative Michigan Law School of the day, a school where the very air we breathed was suffused with the idea that the promotion of big business is the only proper goal of lawyers. So, as a kid of 24 or 25 who was outraged by Wechsler’s view, I wrote about it in an article that, after being rejected by the truly big shot law reviews of the day, actually got published in the UCLA Law Review, which wasn’t too bad a result even though that law school was still fairly new at the time.

But, although the article probably wasn’t too shabby, it was, after all, the product of a young kid of 24 or 25. So, when I saw almost 30 years later that the renowned and conservative Richard Posner had eviscerated Wechsler’s piece in ways that a 24 or 25 year old kid had never dreamed of 30 years before, but as part of the broader evisceration had also lambasted Wechsler’s lack of professional concern (as opposed to human concern, which he had) for real world results . . . well, this was, to say the least, interesting.

Also in 1993, Posner wrote an article in a Michigan Law Review symposium that addressed the criticism of legal education and legal writing leveled by Judge Harry Edwards, himself a Michigan graduate. Put in brief compass, although Edwards is considered a liberal, his fundamental criticism of legal writing was that it wasn’t sufficiently "doctrinal," as it is said. Instead of being about legal doctrine, too much legal writing, especially at the so-called "elite" schools, is about sociology or economics, or philosophy, etc.

Posner leveled both barrels at this criticism. One of his barrels was more than a mere whiff of grape detailing the benefit that such so-called "interdisciplinary" writing has had. Posner started with the field he knew best, law and economics. Admitting that its transformation of antitrust law is regarded by some as merely providing intellectual cover for conservative social and political results desired by judges, he said that he himself thought the transformation of antitrust was desirable, and that law and economics had also contributed to such widely approved results as the deregulation of transportation and communications, had contributed to the awarding of hedonic damages (damages "for loss of the pleasure of living"), had given economic arguments to women in divorce cases, had provided new lines of proof in employment discrimination matters, and had had desirable effects in numerous other fields too. Turning to non-law-and-economic matters, he indicated that feminist writings have had an effect "on rape law, sexual harassment, employment discrimination," that testimony by political scientists has had an effect on reapportionment cases, that "a literature informed by philosophy and literary theory" has affected constitutional and statutory interpretation, and so forth.

No doubt, in some areas where effect is seen by Posner, such effect is politically conservative. In others, though, the effects would almost certainly seem politically liberal -- which brings one to the major point here. As shown by areas where the effects are liberal or at least would likely be considered such today -- hedonic damages, economic arguments for women in divorce cases, sexual harassment and employment discrimination -- Posner is not reflexively conservative, is not always and unthinkingly conservative. He considers and adopts liberal positions, I believe, where he thinks them the stronger. He does not consider them the stronger nearly as much as this writer might, but he surely seems not to be closed minded, and for sure he is not blind to merits in arguments on the other side of his own.

These two 1993 articles caused this writer to reassess his view of Posner’s work. One knows there are lawyers in Chicago who have regarded him as arrogant or sharp towards lawyers when on the bench, or as sometimes inventing facts or a new, possibly idiosyncratic view of a case. And one may not agree fundamentally with his intellectual approach. But the fact remains that he is one smart dude who has written publicly about so many things that it seems he has written publicly about everything, and -- very importantly -- whose mind is open to good arguments.

In certain of these respects Posner contrasts dramatically with John Roberts. Roberts also is very smart. But he seems to have avoided a public record, documents that might reveal his more recent views have been withheld, and his refusal to answer questions means that fundamental views he may now hold are unknown. Holding unknown views seems almost a prerequisite these days to nomination and confirmation as a Justice, and is one of the reasons a man like Posner cannot be nominated. (Other reasons he wouldn’t be nominated by Bush are that his writings, as I think he has said on television, have created lots of opponents, he is not a right wing zealot, and he is unlikely to be on the bench for 30 years to impose right wing zealotry for three decades). All one can say about this is that it is a shame that a man as smart, accomplished and publicly understood as Posner cannot be nominated, while the opaque and reticent can be and, indeed, perhaps one need be opaque and reticent to be.

* * * * *

Which brings me to George Bush. George Bush is not smart as hell, very competent, and accomplished, as Roberts, Stein and Posner are. He is, rather, dumb, a former drunk who was a serial failure in business, an incompetent as he has been intent on proving with regard to Iraq, social security, New Orleans and other matters, and a great user of platitudes as well as an afficionado of photo ops instead of achievement.

George Bush is a child of privilege, as Roberts was and as Stein may in some respects have been because his Dad was so accomplished. But unlike Stein, any and every field was open to George Bush. He got into a few of them and managed to pretty much eff them up.

Unlike Roberts, Stein and Posner, all of whom succeeded outside of politics, George Bush succeeded only in or because of politics, that den of bushwa and iniquity, and succeeded there only because of who daddy and grandpa were.

Unlike Roberts, Stein and Posner, who as far as I know have committed no crimes, George Bush has been in criminal violation of the Anti-Torture Statute for years. One would venture that, if it hasn’t occurred already, you can bet that before Bush leaves office there will be a lot of destruction of documents and computer disks, and lots of attempted purging of hard drives, in the White House, the Department of Justice and the Pentagon in order to try to permanently hide the extent to which Bush and his pals are guilty of crimes.

And unlike Roberts, Stein or Posner, George Bush is the man our system has thrown up, in both senses of the phrase, to be President. Thrown up not just for one term, no less, but, heaven help us, for two.*

*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

Friday, September 16, 2005

Re: Bob Scheer in the LA Times

September 16, 2005

Dear Peter:

For some reason my office never gave me the hard copy of your email containing Scheer’s article, nor did it appear on my Blackberry until last Wednesday or so. So I am just now writing to thank you for it.

Scheer’s piece is indeed excellent. I may write a response to certain aspects of it next week, in particular the fact that racial prejudice and general government incompetence and dishonesty had a big impact in causing the white middle and lower classes to accept the views that Scheer decries.

Re: Vietnam War

It is, as I've said, my best recollection that I began turning against the Viet Nam War in a major way because, for various reasons, especially including the ineffectiveness of our bombing, one could see, if one looked, that the U.S. would never succeed. This meant that lots of people on both sides were being killed for no reason at all, and a desire to see useless killing end is, it seems to me, a moral position. It is, I think, quite different to justify the killing of soldiers and civilians in a moral, necessary and potentially (and then ultimately) successful cause like WWII,where we were fighting a horrible tyranny, than to try to justify extensivekilling in a cause that cannot succeed.

Realization of impracticality can and often does lead one to examine associated questions, such as the morality and the political rights and wrongs of a situation. So I think it was to a major extent with regard to Nam. My best recollection is that, while such matters were a subject of some personal consciousness before it became clear that America had entered a horrible cul de sac in which it could not succeed, personal focus on such matters increased considerably once I realized -- before most people I would immodestly say -- that we were in an unwinnable war that could take tens of thousands of lives for no achievable purpose. (Millions of lives on bothsides was not yet even on the general American radar screen in, say, late 1965 and early 1966.)

It seems to me that consciousness of practical results, or likely practical results, is not inconsistent with morality. Rather, it is often the first step towards morality. Viz., Chamberlain's horribly wrong view of consequent practical results at Munich, which led to an appeasement that could be considered immoral in light of subsequent events, or, and for the same reasons, the earlier French failure to respond when Hitler marched into the Rhineland, or the current administration's total misjudgments leading to the present Gulf War. You know, if the practical results of the current war had been destruction of atomic weapons of mass destruction, or creation of democracy and an associated end to wars throughout the Middle East (including solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict), and/or the associated creation of a thoroughgoing, stable, western style democracy in Iraq itself, rather than the massive useless killing we have seen and continue to see, then it might well be argued that the current war is moral.

It might, indeed, be hard in such circumstances to argue the opposite. Practical facts can and often do bear on and even control questions of morality, and also, of course, can and do lead to the initial questioning of the morality of a situation.

Do you disagree with any of this?

I will make one other point in this connection. Observation of numerous actual events of the last 45 years has led me to the belief that this nation has in all-too-many respects become immoral. This is, as indicated, a judgment founded on facts of the world (and if the judgment is partly orwholly wrong, it is wrong either because the claimed facts are not true or because they are sufficiently offset by counter facts). One of the ways in which I think we have lost our morality is that we are now a highly militaristic nation -- a condition which is immoral because history shows it to be a condition from which nothing good can occur in the long run, but which instead always results, ultimately, in some major disaster or other, or even in many major disasters.

Because the view that we are now a militaristic country is so contrary to the conventional wisdom and prevailing discourse, I am closely reading with great delight a new book which fleshes out this position, often brilliantly. It is called The New American Militarism and is written by Andrew Bacevich, a professor of varied and unusual background. (Among other things, he was a career officer before obtaining a doctorate at Princeton.) Bacevich is going to be on my book show to discuss his book for an hour -- which is why I am reading hiswork particularly closely -- with the taping scheduled for October 14th. (I do not yet know exactly when the show will be broadcast.) Especially because of your own views, I would warmly recommend his book to you as one that you will like and will send you a copy of the videotape after the taping session.

I'm shocked by your statement that you opposed the war in Vietnam because you were sureit was unwinnable. What happened to the idealistic L. Velvel I knew at the time? Should I nowrevise my beliefs about that young man because he would then have argued in favor of theconstitutionality of the war if he had reached the conclusion that the war was winnable?

Re: David Brooks' Brilliant Column on the Roberts Hearing

No wonder the Democrats are in trouble -- even with this inept administration accelerating its slide down the greaseless tubes. The rambling, incoherent, irrelevent speeches of Kennedy, Biden, etc. should be an embarrasment to anyone beyond his first year of junior high school. It reminds me of Kerry who couldn't see himself even in the face of blistering attacks. These guys are putty in the hands of our next Chief Justice. Like his philosphy or not, he is smart, articulate, measured and with humor.

As said before on this blog, although this writer generally has little regard for David Brooks’ columns in The New York Times, occasionally -- perhaps one time in five -- he comes up with a piece that is truly excellent, even sometimes sheer genius. His column in today’s Times (Thursday, September 15th) about the Senate hearings on the Roberts’ nomination is a piece of real brilliance. It is so good that I have appended it below for your reading pleasure. ("Pleasure" is the right word, I think.)*

*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

http://www.nytimes.com/September 15, 2005

Ready? Cue the Sun...

By DAVID BROOKS

Arlen Specter Welcome to Day 3 of the confirmation hearings of John Roberts. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind the nation of what a wonderful job I'm doing chairing this committee, and I'd like to let the ranking member tell me so.

Patrick Leahy Absolutely, Mr. Chairman! And let me kick off this morning's platitudes about the grandeur of our Constitution by quoting its first three words, "We the People." That means that here in America the people rule - except on issues like abortion, where their opinions don't mean spit.

Specter Very well put, Senator Leahy! And welcome Judge Roberts back before our committee.

John Roberts Jr. Aw, shucks. This has been a humbling experience, Mr. Chairman. To think that a boy from an exclusive prep school and Harvard Law could grow up and be nominated for the Supreme Court - it shows how in America it's possible to rise from privilege to power! That's the hallmark of our great nation.

So while, of course, I can't talk about specific cases, or any emotions, weather patterns or sandwich meats that may come before the Supreme Court at any time between now and my death in 2048, I do want to reiterate that I feel humbled by this experience. I feel humbled that my wife is dozing off behind me. I feel humbled by this committee's inability to lay a glove on me. And I feel modest. You see this suit? I skinny-dip in this suit. That's how modest I feel.

Tom Coburn Well put, Judge Roberts. Yet when I think of the polarization that still divides this great nation ... waaaahhhh ... waaaahhhh. (Senator Coburn breaks down weeping.)

Jeff Sessions This may be a good moment to remind my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that in this country unelected judges don't write the laws. We have unelected lobbyists to do that. Under our system, judges merely interpret the law and decide presidential elections.

Specter Senator Sessions, let me interrupt you right there. We're not here to argue among ourselves and ignore the nominee. We're here to deliver 30-minute speeches disguised as questions and ignore the nominee. So let me turn to Senator Bid - -

Coburn And when I think of the flaws in the reconciliation process! And the gerrymandering! Oh, the suffering! Oh, the humanity! Waaaahhhh ... waaaahhhh. (Senator Coburn collapses and is taken back to his office on a stretcher.)

Specter As I was saying, Senator Biden, you have the floor.

Joseph Biden Jr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thought this might be a good moment to give the committee a complete history of my heroic sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act, but before I do that I'd like to interrupt myself by mentioning that I ride the train every day, often speaking with regular Americans, but before I do that I'd like to interrupt my interruption of myself by asking the chairman to restrain the nominee. During my first round of questioning, the nominee continually interrupted my questions by trying to give answers. I could barely keep up my train of thought on stare decisis.

Edward Kennedy Starry De Cysis? Didn't she do a fan dance down at that old burlesque house in Providence?

Roberts Mr. Chairman, I certainly don't mean to draw attention to myself, for, as I have said, judges are like umpires - not home plate umpires, but those umpires stuck way out by the right-field foul pole. Nobody ever went to a game to watch the umpires.

But as you know, Judge Ginsburg, during her confirmation hearing, had herself wrapped in duct tape for fear that any involuntary reflex gestures she might make would mar her impartiality in deciding cases later on. Following her example, I have decided to spend the rest of these hearings in a soundproof booth, sunk in a tank of ravenous sharks and accompanied only by the illusionist David Copperfield. But before I go into isolation, I would like to mention the intense modesty I feel at this moment, notwithstanding the fact that not a single one of you slobs could have charged $700 an hour the way I did in private practice.

Richard Durbin Judge Roberts, before you go, one of the ways we in the Senate prove our superior souls is by emoting mawkish sentimentality on cue. Would you please emote sadness and pain on behalf of politically powerful but downtrodden groups?

Re: David Brooks’ Brilliant Column On The Roberts Hearing

As said before on this blog, although this writer generally has little regard for David Brooks’ columns in The New York Times, occasionally -- perhaps one time in five -- he comes up with a piece that is truly excellent, even sometimes sheer genius. His column in today’s Times (Thursday, September 15th) about the Senate hearings on the Roberts’ nomination is a piece of real brilliance. It is so good that I have appended it below for your reading pleasure. ("Pleasure" is the right word, I think.)*

*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do obje

www.nytimes.http://com/September 15, 2005

Ready? Cue the Sun...

By DAVID BROOKS

Arlen Specter Welcome to Day 3 of the confirmation hearings of John Roberts. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind the nation of what a wonderful job I'm doing chairing this committee, and I'd like to let the ranking member tell me so.

Patrick Leahy Absolutely, Mr. Chairman! And let me kick off this morning's platitudes about the grandeur of our Constitution by quoting its first three words, "We the People." That means that here in America the people rule - except on issues like abortion, where their opinions don't mean spit.

Specter Very well put, Senator Leahy! And welcome Judge Roberts back before our committee.

John Roberts Jr. Aw, shucks. This has been a humbling experience, Mr. Chairman. To think that a boy from an exclusive prep school and Harvard Law could grow up and be nominated for the Supreme Court - it shows how in America it's possible to rise from privilege to power! That's the hallmark of our great nation.

So while, of course, I can't talk about specific cases, or any emotions, weather patterns or sandwich meats that may come before the Supreme Court at any time between now and my death in 2048, I do want to reiterate that I feel humbled by this experience. I feel humbled that my wife is dozing off behind me. I feel humbled by this committee's inability to lay a glove on me. And I feel modest. You see this suit? I skinny-dip in this suit. That's how modest I feel.

Tom Coburn Well put, Judge Roberts. Yet when I think of the polarization that still divides this great nation ... waaaahhhh ... waaaahhhh. (Senator Coburn breaks down weeping.)

Jeff Sessions This may be a good moment to remind my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that in this country unelected judges don't write the laws. We have unelected lobbyists to do that. Under our system, judges merely interpret the law and decide presidential elections.

Specter Senator Sessions, let me interrupt you right there. We're not here to argue among ourselves and ignore the nominee. We're here to deliver 30-minute speeches disguised as questions and ignore the nominee. So let me turn to Senator Bid - -

Coburn And when I think of the flaws in the reconciliation process! And the gerrymandering! Oh, the suffering! Oh, the humanity! Waaaahhhh ... waaaahhhh. (Senator Coburn collapses and is taken back to his office on a stretcher.)

Specter As I was saying, Senator Biden, you have the floor.

Joseph Biden Jr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thought this might be a good moment to give the committee a complete history of my heroic sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act, but before I do that I'd like to interrupt myself by mentioning that I ride the train every day, often speaking with regular Americans, but before I do that I'd like to interrupt my interruption of myself by asking the chairman to restrain the nominee. During my first round of questioning, the nominee continually interrupted my questions by trying to give answers. I could barely keep up my train of thought on stare decisis.

Edward Kennedy Starry De Cysis? Didn't she do a fan dance down at that old burlesque house in Providence?

Roberts Mr. Chairman, I certainly don't mean to draw attention to myself, for, as I have said, judges are like umpires - not home plate umpires, but those umpires stuck way out by the right-field foul pole. Nobody ever went to a game to watch the umpires.

But as you know, Judge Ginsburg, during her confirmation hearing, had herself wrapped in duct tape for fear that any involuntary reflex gestures she might make would mar her impartiality in deciding cases later on. Following her example, I have decided to spend the rest of these hearings in a soundproof booth, sunk in a tank of ravenous sharks and accompanied only by the illusionist David Copperfield. But before I go into isolation, I would like to mention the intense modesty I feel at this moment, notwithstanding the fact that not a single one of you slobs could have charged $700 an hour the way I did in private practice.

Richard Durbin Judge Roberts, before you go, one of the ways we in the Senate prove our superior souls is by emoting mawkish sentimentality on cue. Would you please emote sadness and pain on behalf of politically powerful but downtrodden groups?

Friday, September 09, 2005

Re: A Brilliant Article About Iraq

A brilliant article about the Iraq war, written by a former Washington Post and Knight Ridder reporter named Lewis M. Simons, appeared in the most recent National Weekly Edition of The Washington Post. I have appended it below because of its sheer trenchancy (if trenchancy is a word. (If not, it’s just been coined.))* * * * *

A Tale of Two WarsIn Baghdad, I Hear Echoes of Saigon in '67

By Lewis M. SimonsSunday, August 28, 2005; B01

I went to Vietnam a hawk. It was July 1967; I was an ex-Marine and a reporter for the Associated Press. It took only a few months before I realized I was being fed official lies on a daily basis. Now, having spent decades covering war and its aftermath around the world, I have just been through an eerily reminiscent experience in Iraq.

In the Baghdad of 2005, as in the Saigon of four decades ago, my government tells me that by staying the course, we'll cut out a vicious tumor metastasizing through the body of Western democracy.

Today's cancer is terrorism, not the red menace. But the singular constant remains this: Armies and governments at war all lie. They tell us that we're winning hearts and minds, that the troops will be home for Christmas, that the mission is accomplished. They did it then, and they're doing it now.

My hawkishness is long gone. I went to Iraq this May on an assignment for National Geographic magazine, already convinced that this war was a mistake. I found myself cloistered in a nightmare world, behind layers of 12-foot concrete barriers beyond which no thinking American strays without armed guards. I returned home a month later, certain that this war, like Vietnam, will never be won.

What would "winning" in Iraq mean, anyway? A democratic society that's free to elect an anti-American, pro-Iranian, fundamentalist Islamic government? A land of gushing oil wells feeding international oil company profits at U.S. taxpayers' expense? Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis joining hands to end terrorism around the world? Since, in my judgment, we were wrong to go in, I'm afraid there's no good way to get out.

Americans didn't know what "winning" meant in Vietnam, either. Most didn't understand the enemy, its objectives or the lengths to which it was prepared to go to attain them. We had a fuzzy notion of communist "world domination," and the "domino theory" and no realization that what the Vietnamese wanted, south and north, was independence. They didn't want to take over Southeast Asia. They didn't want to invade Los Angeles. They wanted to run their own country. They wanted us out.

Nor do we understand Iraq. The truth -- that Iraq was not a terrorist haven before we invaded, but we're making it into one today -- has been thickly painted over with unending coats of misinformation.

The enemy body-count fiasco at Saigon's daily "5 o'clock follies" -- as military briefings were dubbed by a derisive press corps -- has been replaced by meaningless claims of dead insurgents. Lyndon Johnson's vision of "light at the end of the tunnel" has evolved into Dick Cheney's embarrassing "last throes." Where 392 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam from 1962 through 1964, the first three years of the war, (and 58,000 by the time of the U.S. withdrawal in 1975), after 2 1/2 years in Iraq we have nearly 1,900 American KIAs. Where 2 million Vietnamese were killed by the war's end, we have no idea how many Iraqis have died since we unleashed "shock and awe." Is it 10,000, 20,000, 30,000? More? Who knows? Who in America cares?

This blithe American disregard for their lives infuriates Iraqis. After President Bush recently congratulated soldiers at Fort Bragg for fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we wouldn't have to face them here at home, a Baghdad University professor told an interviewer that Bush was saying that Iraqis had to die to make Americans safe.

What we failed to understand in Vietnam -- that people who want foreign occupiers out of their country are willing and prepared to withstand any kind of privation and risk for however long it takes -- we are failing, once again, to grasp in Iraq.

I've returned repeatedly to Vietnam since the war. About 20 miles northwest of Saigon, in Cu Chi, I had one of the more harrowing experiences of my reporting career, crawling for an hour through black, airless, grave-like tunnels that spider-web for well over 100 miles beneath the jungle floor. (This was before the Tourism Ministry enlarged some of the passages, to accommodate super-size Western travelers.)

Here, entire armies and civilian communities had lived and worked and plotted attacks, through not just the American war but the earlier war against the French. With dirt dropping into my sweat-stinging eyes, my imagination raced: What must it have been like with tanks and bombers rumbling overhead? When I stumbled out, heart pounding, I told my guide that finally I understood why his side had won.

Today, Muslim suicide bombers and terrorists are our Viet Cong. We can bring 'em on, smoke 'em out and hunt 'em down from now until doomsday, but the line of committed volunteers seems only to grow longer. The world -- not just the Middle East, but South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America -- is being populated with more and more alienated and bitter young Muslims who feel that they have nothing to lose. The ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq and across the Middle East doesn't intimidate them; it just stokes their fury.

That there is no military solution to this conundrum is clearly illustrated by a ride I took on my first day in Baghdad. The small plane I flew on from Amman, Jordan, corkscrewed into Baghdad airport early one afternoon. The South African pilot warned the 20 passengers that the stomach-heaving descent might be uncomfortable, but that it was necessary in order to avoid any heat-seeking missiles. The last time I'd made such a landing was in April 1975, on a flight into Phnom Penh as a correspondent for The Washington Post. Two weeks later, Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge.

I was bound this time for the relative security of the walled-in Green Zone, just five miles from the airport. For security reasons, we could not leave immediately. I was assigned one of two dozen canvas cots in a large tent. It was air-conditioned. (This -- along with Internet availability, 30-minute-guaranteed to-your-tent-door Pizza Hut delivery, Cuban cigars at the PX, fresh meals and regularly sanitized portable toilets -- is one of the gains the U.S. military has achieved since Vietnam.) We weren't told our departure time.

At 3 a.m. a chipper sergeant with a bullhorn voice flicked on the tent lights and told us to get up and put on body armor and helmets. Three Rhino Runner buses, painted desert-tan and heavily steel-plated, were lined up and 90 of us, mostly GIs and civilian contractors, boarded. Three armed Humvees preceded us; three followed. Overhead clattered three Blackhawk helicopters.

Again I was reminded of Vietnam, where the GIs used to say that the night belonged to the VC. In Iraq, it's the roads -- where IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, have replaced punji sticks as the guerrilla weapon of choice. If, 2 1/2 years in, you don't control the only road linking your military airport to your headquarters, you don't control much of anything.

The next day, a U.S. Marine Corps brigadier general told a televised news conference that the escalating rate of car bombings in the capital and around the country was a sure sign of the enemy's "final desperation." (Two weeks later, Cheney issued his tweaked version.) The troops on the ground in Iraq, much like the grunts in Vietnam, know better. Yet by and large they're loyal, and most told me that they believe in the mission -- at least until they're ordered back for their second or third tours. These "stop loss" soldiers are most bitter about their perception that the administration's effort to wage the war on the cheap applies only to them, while private contractors grow rich.

On the green plastic wall of a portable toilet at Baghdad military airport, I read the following graffiti, scrawled by a civilian contract employee: "14 months. $200,000. I'm out of here. [Expletive] you Iraq." Beneath it was a response from the ranks: "12 months. $20,000. What the [expletive] is going on here?" Speaking of money, the administration has never come clean about the massive debt it's piling up for us and our descendants. The nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates that the Vietnam War cost the United States $600 billion in today's dollars. Iraq, according to the center, is costing between $5 billion and $8 billion a month -- $218 billion to date. That would mean $700 billion if the guns fall silent six years from now, a modest timetable according to numerous military analysts. Other estimates predict an eventual bottom line of over $1 trillion.

So, do we cut our losses -- human and financial -- and leave? If so, when? If not, how long do we stay? If we stay, the insurgency continues; if we go, it most likely expands into an all-out civil war, the fragmenting of Iraq and the intervention of its neighbors, Iran, Turkey and Syria, followed by the collapse of promised democracy in the Middle East: a kind of reverse domino theory. What likely will happen in the short term, it's beginning to appear, will be an attempt to spin a more positive illusion: President Bush will order several thousand troops sent home in time for the 2006 midterm election campaign. He will claim that the Iraqis are taking charge of their own security (see "Vietnamization") and leave the mess to his successor.

Then what? If the bulk of the 130,000 U.S. troops are kept in Iraq for the rump of the Bush presidency and into the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic, the insurgency will go on.

The tax dollars we'll be spending on that military presence might be better spent on helping educate new generations of Iraqis, and millions of other young Muslims around the world, on the basics of running a country. They need it: "Democracy is wonderful," exclaimed a mother of two teenagers whom I met in the southern city of Basra. "It means you're free to do whatever you want." While that may be an understandable interpretation from a people who weren't free to do anything under Saddam Hussein's 35-year dictatorship, surely it's not what Americans are fighting and dying for.

The ultimate lesson of Vietnam -- one that is applicable to Iraq -- has been that once Americans declared victory and returned home, the Vietnamese went through the inevitable, sometimes brutal, shakeout that we had merely delayed. Eventually, the realities of the marketplace and the appeal of capitalism resulted in a nominally communist but vibrant nation. Today, Americans feast on low-cost Vietnamese shrimp and wear inexpensive Vietnamese T-shirts. Two month ago, President Bush welcomed Prime Minister Phan Van Khai to the White House and promised him increased trade and military cooperation.

So, what happens if we don't apply that lesson to our Iraq adventure? One of the most senior diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad told me that what he and his colleagues believed, and what kept them awake at night, was that if the United States is serious about establishing democracy in Iraq, and attempts to do so under current policies, it would take two generations of our soldiers fighting there. That's 40 years.

You may want to pass that along to your grandchildren.

Lewis Simons, a former foreign correspondent for The Post and for Knight Ridder newspapers, is a contributor to National Geographic.

Re: A Brilliant Article About Iraq

A brilliant article about the Iraq war, written by a former Washington Post and Knight Ridder reporter named Lewis M. Simons, appeared in the most recent National Weekly Edition of The Washington Post. I have appended it below because of its sheer trenchancy (if trenchancy is a word. (If not, it’s just been coined.))* * * * *

A Tale of Two WarsIn Baghdad, I Hear Echoes of Saigon in '67

By Lewis M. SimonsSunday, August 28, 2005; B01

I went to Vietnam a hawk. It was July 1967; I was an ex-Marine and a reporter for the Associated Press. It took only a few months before I realized I was being fed official lies on a daily basis. Now, having spent decades covering war and its aftermath around the world, I have just been through an eerily reminiscent experience in Iraq.

In the Baghdad of 2005, as in the Saigon of four decades ago, my government tells me that by staying the course, we'll cut out a vicious tumor metastasizing through the body of Western democracy.

Today's cancer is terrorism, not the red menace. But the singular constant remains this: Armies and governments at war all lie. They tell us that we're winning hearts and minds, that the troops will be home for Christmas, that the mission is accomplished. They did it then, and they're doing it now.

My hawkishness is long gone. I went to Iraq this May on an assignment for National Geographic magazine, already convinced that this war was a mistake. I found myself cloistered in a nightmare world, behind layers of 12-foot concrete barriers beyond which no thinking American strays without armed guards. I returned home a month later, certain that this war, like Vietnam, will never be won.

What would "winning" in Iraq mean, anyway? A democratic society that's free to elect an anti-American, pro-Iranian, fundamentalist Islamic government? A land of gushing oil wells feeding international oil company profits at U.S. taxpayers' expense? Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis joining hands to end terrorism around the world? Since, in my judgment, we were wrong to go in, I'm afraid there's no good way to get out.

Americans didn't know what "winning" meant in Vietnam, either. Most didn't understand the enemy, its objectives or the lengths to which it was prepared to go to attain them. We had a fuzzy notion of communist "world domination," and the "domino theory" and no realization that what the Vietnamese wanted, south and north, was independence. They didn't want to take over Southeast Asia. They didn't want to invade Los Angeles. They wanted to run their own country. They wanted us out.

Nor do we understand Iraq. The truth -- that Iraq was not a terrorist haven before we invaded, but we're making it into one today -- has been thickly painted over with unending coats of misinformation.

The enemy body-count fiasco at Saigon's daily "5 o'clock follies" -- as military briefings were dubbed by a derisive press corps -- has been replaced by meaningless claims of dead insurgents. Lyndon Johnson's vision of "light at the end of the tunnel" has evolved into Dick Cheney's embarrassing "last throes." Where 392 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam from 1962 through 1964, the first three years of the war, (and 58,000 by the time of the U.S. withdrawal in 1975), after 2 1/2 years in Iraq we have nearly 1,900 American KIAs. Where 2 million Vietnamese were killed by the war's end, we have no idea how many Iraqis have died since we unleashed "shock and awe." Is it 10,000, 20,000, 30,000? More? Who knows? Who in America cares?

This blithe American disregard for their lives infuriates Iraqis. After President Bush recently congratulated soldiers at Fort Bragg for fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we wouldn't have to face them here at home, a Baghdad University professor told an interviewer that Bush was saying that Iraqis had to die to make Americans safe.

What we failed to understand in Vietnam -- that people who want foreign occupiers out of their country are willing and prepared to withstand any kind of privation and risk for however long it takes -- we are failing, once again, to grasp in Iraq.

I've returned repeatedly to Vietnam since the war. About 20 miles northwest of Saigon, in Cu Chi, I had one of the more harrowing experiences of my reporting career, crawling for an hour through black, airless, grave-like tunnels that spider-web for well over 100 miles beneath the jungle floor. (This was before the Tourism Ministry enlarged some of the passages, to accommodate super-size Western travelers.)

Here, entire armies and civilian communities had lived and worked and plotted attacks, through not just the American war but the earlier war against the French. With dirt dropping into my sweat-stinging eyes, my imagination raced: What must it have been like with tanks and bombers rumbling overhead? When I stumbled out, heart pounding, I told my guide that finally I understood why his side had won.

Today, Muslim suicide bombers and terrorists are our Viet Cong. We can bring 'em on, smoke 'em out and hunt 'em down from now until doomsday, but the line of committed volunteers seems only to grow longer. The world -- not just the Middle East, but South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America -- is being populated with more and more alienated and bitter young Muslims who feel that they have nothing to lose. The ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq and across the Middle East doesn't intimidate them; it just stokes their fury.

That there is no military solution to this conundrum is clearly illustrated by a ride I took on my first day in Baghdad. The small plane I flew on from Amman, Jordan, corkscrewed into Baghdad airport early one afternoon. The South African pilot warned the 20 passengers that the stomach-heaving descent might be uncomfortable, but that it was necessary in order to avoid any heat-seeking missiles. The last time I'd made such a landing was in April 1975, on a flight into Phnom Penh as a correspondent for The Washington Post. Two weeks later, Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge.

I was bound this time for the relative security of the walled-in Green Zone, just five miles from the airport. For security reasons, we could not leave immediately. I was assigned one of two dozen canvas cots in a large tent. It was air-conditioned. (This -- along with Internet availability, 30-minute-guaranteed to-your-tent-door Pizza Hut delivery, Cuban cigars at the PX, fresh meals and regularly sanitized portable toilets -- is one of the gains the U.S. military has achieved since Vietnam.) We weren't told our departure time.

At 3 a.m. a chipper sergeant with a bullhorn voice flicked on the tent lights and told us to get up and put on body armor and helmets. Three Rhino Runner buses, painted desert-tan and heavily steel-plated, were lined up and 90 of us, mostly GIs and civilian contractors, boarded. Three armed Humvees preceded us; three followed. Overhead clattered three Blackhawk helicopters.

Again I was reminded of Vietnam, where the GIs used to say that the night belonged to the VC. In Iraq, it's the roads -- where IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, have replaced punji sticks as the guerrilla weapon of choice. If, 2 1/2 years in, you don't control the only road linking your military airport to your headquarters, you don't control much of anything.

The next day, a U.S. Marine Corps brigadier general told a televised news conference that the escalating rate of car bombings in the capital and around the country was a sure sign of the enemy's "final desperation." (Two weeks later, Cheney issued his tweaked version.) The troops on the ground in Iraq, much like the grunts in Vietnam, know better. Yet by and large they're loyal, and most told me that they believe in the mission -- at least until they're ordered back for their second or third tours. These "stop loss" soldiers are most bitter about their perception that the administration's effort to wage the war on the cheap applies only to them, while private contractors grow rich.

On the green plastic wall of a portable toilet at Baghdad military airport, I read the following graffiti, scrawled by a civilian contract employee: "14 months. $200,000. I'm out of here. [Expletive] you Iraq." Beneath it was a response from the ranks: "12 months. $20,000. What the [expletive] is going on here?" Speaking of money, the administration has never come clean about the massive debt it's piling up for us and our descendants. The nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates that the Vietnam War cost the United States $600 billion in today's dollars. Iraq, according to the center, is costing between $5 billion and $8 billion a month -- $218 billion to date. That would mean $700 billion if the guns fall silent six years from now, a modest timetable according to numerous military analysts. Other estimates predict an eventual bottom line of over $1 trillion.

So, do we cut our losses -- human and financial -- and leave? If so, when? If not, how long do we stay? If we stay, the insurgency continues; if we go, it most likely expands into an all-out civil war, the fragmenting of Iraq and the intervention of its neighbors, Iran, Turkey and Syria, followed by the collapse of promised democracy in the Middle East: a kind of reverse domino theory. What likely will happen in the short term, it's beginning to appear, will be an attempt to spin a more positive illusion: President Bush will order several thousand troops sent home in time for the 2006 midterm election campaign. He will claim that the Iraqis are taking charge of their own security (see "Vietnamization") and leave the mess to his successor.

Then what? If the bulk of the 130,000 U.S. troops are kept in Iraq for the rump of the Bush presidency and into the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic, the insurgency will go on.

The tax dollars we'll be spending on that military presence might be better spent on helping educate new generations of Iraqis, and millions of other young Muslims around the world, on the basics of running a country. They need it: "Democracy is wonderful," exclaimed a mother of two teenagers whom I met in the southern city of Basra. "It means you're free to do whatever you want." While that may be an understandable interpretation from a people who weren't free to do anything under Saddam Hussein's 35-year dictatorship, surely it's not what Americans are fighting and dying for.

The ultimate lesson of Vietnam -- one that is applicable to Iraq -- has been that once Americans declared victory and returned home, the Vietnamese went through the inevitable, sometimes brutal, shakeout that we had merely delayed. Eventually, the realities of the marketplace and the appeal of capitalism resulted in a nominally communist but vibrant nation. Today, Americans feast on low-cost Vietnamese shrimp and wear inexpensive Vietnamese T-shirts. Two month ago, President Bush welcomed Prime Minister Phan Van Khai to the White House and promised him increased trade and military cooperation.

So, what happens if we don't apply that lesson to our Iraq adventure? One of the most senior diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad told me that what he and his colleagues believed, and what kept them awake at night, was that if the United States is serious about establishing democracy in Iraq, and attempts to do so under current policies, it would take two generations of our soldiers fighting there. That's 40 years.

You may want to pass that along to your grandchildren.

Lewis Simons, a former foreign correspondent for The Post and for Knight Ridder newspapers, is a contributor to National Geographic.

Re: The So-Called Blame Game

I agree with your assessment but I would add some additional thoughts.

Notice also how the Bush Administration never responds to the funding cut-backs of the Army Corps of Engineers. Instead all they talk about is how there was a failure in responding adequately at a "local, state and national level." They know that it will be better politically to have to share the blame for the response, because after all, the rest could not have been predicted. As the price tag mounts -- Senator Landrieu believes that it will reach 200 billion -- the Administration will keep the discussion away from the failure of the government to do what government is supposed to do, protect the people.

I think that you let them off too easy by putting it only at Bush's doorstep. This is part of the political philosophy of many conservatives. They believe that government should be minimalist, and all of the concern about racism and poverty is just nonsense. So there are layers of issues that have to be talked about -- I don't care what the order is but they must all be combined into one package.

Thanks for your blogs.

On Sep 8, 2005, at 10:29 AM, Dean Lawrence R. Velvel wrote:

September 8, 2005

Re: The So-called Blame Game.

From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel

VelvelOnNationalAffairs.com

Dear Colleagues:

The current Bushian ploy for seeking to escape responsibility for awful conduct is to say that this is no time to focus on what went wrong in New Orleans. We should, rather, focus on rebuilding lives, rebuilding a city. One has but to turn on the tube to hear this said by the Bushers, including their Congressional henchmen like Denny Hastert.

Well, of course we should focus on rebuilding lives and cities. But we should also focus on determining responsibility and on holding accountable those whose incompetence -- whose even conceivable malignity against the less fortunate of the earth -- contributed to the disaster in the Gulf states. (Both sets of Gulf states incidentally, i.e., both at home and in the Middle East.) For the failure to determine, point fingers at and punish the guilty, the incompetent, the immoral, the stupid is one of the reasons our public life has undergone the systemic failure discussed in yesterday’s posting. It is one of the reasons that incompetence and dishonesty rule. What is to stop them from ruling if we do not assign responsibility and in appropriate ways -- politically, legally, or both -- punish those who are guilty of them?

As said before on this blog, one of the reasons we keep getting into and staying in debilitating, avoidable wars is that nobody in power gets punished in courts of law for unlawful evilness or blockheadedness in doing this. Not Johnson, not Bush, not McNamara, not Nixon, not Kissinger, not Bush II, not Wolfowitz, not anybody. One of the reasons we tortured people is that the Administration’s lawyers invented bushwa reasons why those who ordered, allowed, or committed torture would supposedly not be punishable under the Anti-Torture Statute. What the Bushers and their Hastertian henchmen are doing today is that they are trying to continue, in the political sphere, the lack of accountability and lack of punishment for incompetent and/or wilfully negligent acts that has protected Bush and company in both the political and legal spheres.

You know, what the Bushers are doing is just another example of the double standard usually applied in America. The Bushers, and lots of the rest of us too -- let’s admit it -- look at the pictures of looting in New Orleans and say those people are doing terrible things. Some of us have the decency to exclude from this judgment those who are taking necessities of life such as food, medicine and baby needs, rather than TV sets or fancy blue jeans. Some of the Bushers, I unhappily suspect, would not even exclude those who are doing only what is necessary to stay alive. But be all this as it may, the fact is that, as a general matter, this society is quick to hold accountable and punish the poor, the black. We also have been known to seek, encourage, or ourselves impose punishment or retribution upon foreign leaders whose policies displeased us: Mossadeq, Lumumba, the Diems, the Sandinistas, Noriega, Saddam. But hold accountable and appropriately punish, politically or legally, domestic politicians who wilfully commit evil at home or abroad, or who incompetently allow or contribute to terrible things? Not a chance.

Nor for that matter did this society, until the recent debacle on Wall Street, hold accountable and punish, during the 1990s and early 2000s, the crooks, liars and immoralites in business who were stripping people of their money by one crooked scheme and another. (And now that some -- not even all -- of these crooks are going off to the slammer, Wall Street is doing everything it can do loosen the reins of Sarbanes-Oxley.)

Nor have Bushian henchpeople been held accountable in Congress (or elsewhere) for the evil they have done. Rather, Congress gives a free pass to, and promotes to federal judgeships and cabinet positions, participants in the torture business like Alberto Gonzalez, Michael Chertoff and Jay Bybee.

So it is little wonder that people like Bush, Cheney and their corps of henchpeople feel empowered to do or allow evil. For the likes of them there has never been any legal punishment, and only rarely in recent history has there even been any political punishment. (Johnson felt he had to quit and Nixon felt he had better resign one step ahead of the posse, but that’s pretty much it. And it took really awful, long sustained horrible actions for even these two continuous malefactors to receive this political punishment.) And now, having lived in the historically well founded expectation that they will remain free of punishment, whether legal or political, the Bushers and their henchpeople are screaming like stuck pigs because suddenly their misconduct is catching up with them, and suddenly it appears that, because of New Orleans, they are going to have to pay a heavy price for years of misconduct and downright evil.

So they have rolled out the platitudes in a desperate effort to escape this. They are platitudinously telling us that this supposedly is no time to be assigning culpability, that to assign culpability is to play the blame game, and that George the Incompetent is focusing on overcoming the disaster and, like Mommy with her little child, he will make it all better. One begs to differ. While we are desperately trying to right a desperate situation, we also should be seeking to find out who bears contributing responsibility and to impose the appropriate political punishment upon them. Imposing punishment -- politically when justified, legally when justified, or both -- is the only way that decades of misconduct in public life is ever going to end.

Yesterday or the day before, when one of the Busher henchmen came out of a meeting and said to the TV cameras that people shouldn’t be assigning blame now, a female legislator -- I frankly don’t remember who, or even if she was a Democrat or a Republican -- quickly tried to elide this by saying something like, oh no, we’re not doing that, we’re not trying to assign blame. We’re just trying to find out what went wrong so that this kind of debacle can be avoided in the future. Wrong answer. Really the wrong answer. The right answer is that of course we’re trying to determine and assign blame and to then punish the culpable. I should hope we’re trying to do this. For only by determining and assigning blame -- which inherently requires learning what went wrong -- and then punishing the culpable can we ever hope to put an end to bad conduct or negligent conduct.

Punishing the culpable is said to be required in the case of street criminals. Why doesn’t this apply to pols?

You know, it is true that there are people or groups who sometimes, even often, tend to focus excessively on the past to their own detriment. In the Balkans, apparently, people still see things in the light of the Field of Blackbirds, a battle that occurred 500 years ago. According to Bernard Lewis and others, one of the problems in the Arab world, maybe the problem of that world, is that it can’t forget the Arab glories of 500 to 1,200 years ago, and can’t forgive the west for surpassing the Arabs in the last 500 years. Proclaiming that his Irish ancestry gave him license otherwise lacking to say it, an Irish American assistant to Bill Clinton once joked in a speech at our school that, "I’m Irish. So forget the future. Let’s focus on the past." My own tribe, the Jews, tend to focus extensively on the past.

And conversely, one of the great strengths of America has been that its people often tend, even generally tend, to say forget about the past. Instead let’s look to the future, plan for the future, have high hopes for the future. "Optimism is a force multiplier" says one of the rules Colin Powell kept on his desk, if I remember correctly. This is a (quite true) future oriented statement. So too Longfellow’s classic lines, "Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!/ Sail on, O Union, strong and great!/Humanity with all its fears,/With all its hopes of future years,/Is hanging breathless on thy fate!"

But it is all too possible to vastly overdo the ignoring of the past while focusing on the future. This nation has pretty much become, in the last 60 years or so, a country that does not know and ignores history, its mistakes, and its lessons, and which therefore finds itself, as Santayana warned, condemned to repeat the mistakes and having to relearn the lessons. And, as part of our almost exclusively forward looking orientation, we let the malefactors of the past get off scot free, lest we dwell excessively on the past. We tend to think that, if only we forget the past and move forward, then, as the partially hapless Ford said about a month before he pardoned Nixon, our "long national nightmare [will be] over." But it doesn’t work that way (as even Ford’s pardon showed). When you keep on forgetting about the past, and don’t appropriately punish the people who wilfully or negligently or ineptly caused or contributed to terrible disasters, then you just keep on getting more terrible disasters because such people have nothing to fear from causing them or allowing them to happen. That is our theory about punishing street criminals. That was our theory for creating the Nuremberg principles and for hanging the German and Japanese leaders of World War II under those or other rules. Why is the theory inapplicable to the George W. Bushes and Dick Cheneys of this world? If you ask me, it is entirely applicable to them, and, while we simultaneously do everything that can be done to help reconstruct the lives of New Orleanians and rebuild their city, we should also be assessing and assigning blame to all the pols, national, state and local,who contributed to this disaster in the host of ways they did, from cutting funds for levees to doing nothing while people drowned.*

*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Re: The So-called Blame Game

The current Bushian ploy for seeking to escape responsibility for awful conduct is to say that this is no time to focus on what went wrong in New Orleans. We should, rather, focus on rebuilding lives, rebuilding a city. One has but to turn on the tube to hear this said by the Bushers, including their Congressional henchmen like Denny Hastert.

Well, of course we should focus on rebuilding lives and cities. But we should also focus on determining responsibility and on holding accountable those whose incompetence -- whose even conceivable malignity against the less fortunate of the earth -- contributed to the disaster in the Gulf states. (Both sets of Gulf states incidentally, i.e., both at home and in the Middle East.) For the failure to determine, point fingers at and punish the guilty, the incompetent, the immoral, the stupid is one of the reasons our public life has undergone the systemic failure discussed in yesterday’s posting. It is one of the reasons that incompetence and dishonesty rule. What is to stop them from ruling if we do not assign responsibility and in appropriate ways -- politically, legally, or both -- punish those who are guilty of them?

As said before on this blog, one of the reasons we keep getting into and staying in debilitating, avoidable wars is that nobody in power gets punished in courts of law for unlawful evilness or blockheadedness in doing this. Not Johnson, not Rusk, not McNamara, not Nixon, not Kissinger, not Bush II, not Wolfowitz, not anybody. One of the reasons we tortured people is that the Administration’s lawyers invented bushwa reasons why those who ordered, allowed, or committed torture would supposedly not be punishable under the Anti-Torture Statute. What the Bushers and their Hastertian henchmen are doing today is that they are trying to continue, in the political sphere, the lack of accountability and lack of punishment for incompetent and/or wilfully negligent acts that has protected Bush and company in both the political and legal spheres.

You know, what the Bushers are doing is just another example of the double standard usually applied in America. The Bushers, and lots of the rest of us too -- let’s admit it -- look at the pictures of looting in New Orleans and say those people are doing terrible things. Some of us have the decency to exclude from this judgment those who are taking necessities of life such as food, medicine and baby needs, rather than TV sets or fancy blue jeans. Some of the Bushers, I unhappily suspect, would not even exclude those who are doing only what is necessary to stay alive. But be all this as it may, the fact is that, as a general matter, this society is quick to hold accountable and punish the poor, the black. We also have been known to seek, encourage, or ourselves impose punishment or retribution upon foreign leaders whose policies displeased us: Mossadeq, Lumumba, the Diems, the Sandinistas, Noriega, Saddam. But hold accountable and appropriately punish, politically or legally, domestic politicians who wilfully commit evil at home or abroad, or who incompetently allow or contribute to terrible things? Not a chance.

Nor for that matter did this society, until the recent debacle on Wall Street, hold accountable and punish, during the 1990s and early 2000s, the crooks, liars and immoralites in business who were stripping people of their money by one crooked scheme and another. (And now that some -- not even all -- of these crooks are going off to the slammer, Wall Street is doing everything it can do loosen the reins of Sarbanes-Oxley.)

Nor have Bushian henchpeople been held accountable in Congress (or elsewhere) for the evil they have done. Rather, Congress gives a free pass to, and promotes to federal judgeships and cabinet positions, participants in the torture business like Alberto Gonzalez, Michael Chertoff and Jay Bybee.

So it is little wonder that people like Bush, Cheney and their corps of henchpeople feel empowered to do or allow evil. For the likes of them there has never been any legal punishment, and only rarely in recent history has there even been any political punishment. (Johnson felt he had to quit and Nixon felt he had better resign one step ahead of the posse, but that’s pretty much it. And it took really awful, long sustained horrible actions for even these two continuous malefactors to receive this political punishment.) And now, having lived in the historically well founded expectation that they will remain free of punishment, whether legal or political, the Bushers and their henchpeople are screaming like stuck pigs because suddenly their misconduct is catching up with them, and suddenly it appears that, because of New Orleans, they are going to have to pay a heavy price for years of misconduct and downright evil.

So they have rolled out the platitudes in a desperate effort to escape this. They are platitudinously telling us that this supposedly is no time to be assigning culpability, that to assign culpability is to play the blame game, and that George the Incompetent is focusing on overcoming the disaster and, like Mommy with her little child, he will make it all better. One begs to differ. While we are desperately trying to right a desperate situation, we also should be seeking to find out who bears contributing responsibility and to impose the appropriate political punishment upon them. Imposing punishment -- politically when justified, legally when justified, or both -- is the only way that decades of misconduct in public life is ever going to end.

Yesterday or the day before, when one of the Busher henchmen came out of a meeting and said to the TV cameras that people shouldn’t be assigning blame now, a female legislator -- I frankly don’t remember who, or even if she was a Democrat or a Republican -- quickly tried to elide this by saying something like, oh no, we’re not doing that, we’re not trying to assign blame. We’re just trying to find out what went wrong so that this kind of debacle can be avoided in the future. Wrong answer. Really the wrong answer. The right answer is that of course we’re trying to determine and assign blame and to then punish the culpable. I should hope we’re trying to do this. For only by determining and assigning blame -- which inherently requires learning what went wrong -- and then punishing the culpable can we ever hope to put an end to bad conduct or negligent conduct.

Punishing the culpable is said to be required in the case of street criminals. Why doesn’t this apply to pols?

You know, it is true that there are people or groups who sometimes, even often, tend to focus excessively on the past to their own detriment. In the Balkans, apparently, people still see things in the light of the Field of Blackbirds, a battle that occurred 500 years ago. According to Bernard Lewis and others, one of the problems in the Arab world, maybe the problem of that world, is that it can’t forget the Arab glories of 500 to 1,200 years ago, and can’t forgive the west for surpassing the Arabs in the last 500 years. Proclaiming that his Irish ancestry gave him license otherwise lacking to say it, an Irish American assistant to Bill Clinton once joked in a speech at our school that, "I’m Irish. So forget the future. Let’s focus on the past." My own tribe, the Jews, tend to focus extensively on the past.

And conversely, one of the great strengths of America has been that its people often tend, even generally tend, to say forget about the past. Instead let’s look to the future, plan for the future, have high hopes for the future. "Optimism is a force multiplier" says one of the rules Colin Powell kept on his desk, if I remember correctly. This is a (quite true) future oriented statement. So too Longfellow’s classic lines, "Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!/ Sail on, O Union, strong and great!/Humanity with all its fears,/With all its hopes of future years,/Is hanging breathless on thy fate!"

But it is all too possible to vastly overdo the ignoring of the past while focusing on the future. This nation has pretty much become, in the last 60 years or so, a country that does not know and ignores history, its mistakes, and its lessons, and which therefore finds itself, as Santayana warned, condemned to repeat the mistakes and having to relearn the lessons. And, as part of our almost exclusively forward looking orientation, we let the malefactors of the past get off scot free, lest we dwell excessively on the past. We tend to think that, if only we forget the past and move forward, then, as the partially hapless Ford said about a month before he pardoned Nixon, our "long national nightmare [will be] over." But it doesn’t work that way (as even Ford’s pardon showed). When you keep on forgetting about the past, and don’t appropriately punish the people who wilfully or negligently or ineptly caused or contributed to terrible disasters, then you just keep on getting more terrible disasters because such people have nothing to fear from causing them or allowing them to happen. That is our theory about punishing street criminals. That was our theory for creating the Nuremberg principles and for hanging the German and Japanese leaders of World War II under those or other rules. Why is the theory inapplicable to the George W. Bushes and Dick Cheneys of this world? If you ask me, it is entirely applicable to them, and, while we simultaneously do everything that can be done to help reconstruct the lives of New Orleanians and rebuild their city, we should also be assessing and assigning blame to all the pols, national, state and local,who contributed to this disaster in the host of ways they did, from cutting funds for levees to doing nothing while people drowned.*

*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Re: Baghdad And New Orleans; Dishonesty And Honesty; Incompetence And Competence: It’s All Interlinked

Re: Baghdad And New Orleans; Dishonesty And Honesty; Incompetence And Competence: It’s All Interlinked, It’s All The Result Of Where This Country Has Been Going For The Last 45 Years, and It’s A Massive Long-Coming Systemic Failure.

From: Dean Lawrence R. VelvelVelvelOnNationalAffairs.com

Dear Colleagues:

A few weeks ago, relatively shortly after returning from Oxford, this writer was quite surprised when the media and the larger populace did not give George Bush a pass over the fact that he was taking a very long vacation, a five week vacation I think it was supposed to be. The lack of a free pass had a lot to do with the Cindy Sheehan matter, one thinks. Even people who might support Bush and his war could not quite understand why he would not take time out from his vacation to meet with a woman who had lost her son in Iraq. His refusal to meet with her seemed too uncaring, too hardhearted, too unfeeling.The free pass was the more surprising because, when you consider the matter in the abstract, when you consider it purely on principle, his explanation made some sense. He had to live a life too, he said. He too needed a vacation, just like other people do. One might add that getting away from the hothouse atmosphere of Washington in order to clear the mind -- by chopping wood, swimming, hiking, or whatever one chooses to do -- is a very good idea for a President -- or for anyone. Presidents really should do it more often.

One could also add the impossibility of any President meeting with all the mothers who lose sons and daughters in war, so that meeting with Sheehan would not be a good precedent.

But Bush’s explanation did not wash. There are many possible reasons. Perhaps people realized that the Bushian political spin machine never stopped, so that the claim of a vacation is in part Bush-wa. Perhaps people were put off by the sheer length of the vacation: five weeks is longer than executives in far less important positions (like me) would dare to be away at one time, even though they too can remain in hourly touch if they want by Internet, fax, cellphone, handhelds and so on. Five weeks also is longer by far than your average American working stiff gets, I imagine. Perhaps people also recognize that Bush does meet with families of slain soldiers -- so long as the families are supporters of his war. And possibly there also is yet another reason or, sometimes, linked pair of reasons. Maybe lots of people began to realize that Bush is not a nice man, is a man of no empathy despite all his Bush-wa hugging of victims like those of the New Orleans disaster and his hugging of pols like those incompetents from Louisiana after the disaster. The truth is that, rather than being a nice man, Bush is a son of a bitch who is mean as hell to those who do not support him or who oppose him. He is also an evil man, who will do anything to injure opponents, and will countenance the killing of thousands of innocents if he thinks it unavoidable in pursuit of his purposes. There are politicians who have learned that he will evilly do anything to win, opponents like Anne Richards and John McCain. There are tens of thousands of children and other innocent civilians dead of our bombs and shells in Iraq -- the so-called collateral damage -- who learned that Bush will do whatever he can get away with.

Lots of Americans have been fooled by the good old boy personality, by the southern back slapping Kenny-boy and Brownie crapola (for Ken Lay and Michael Brown) that regularly gets laid on thick, by the portrayal of simple sincerity and fellow feeling. But you shouldn’t be fooled for a second. Bush is a guy who has much in common with the coal magnate who, when stridently opposing miners’ demands in, I think, the first decade of the last century, said something to the effect that the (impoverished) miners will be provided for by the good Christian gentleman whom God in his wisdom has put in charge of America. In other words, let them eat cake. So too with Bush. Those who are not oil magnates, or who are poor, or who are black, or who are working stiffs can all eat cake. Thus it is, I note yet again on this blog, that one does not see Bush’s daughters going off to fight the war that he claims is so vital to this country. One sees the poor, the lower middle class, the people who joined the service as a springboard to getting an education, or a few extra bucks a month, going off to fight it.

But Bush is more than unempathetic, mean, evil. He is also, I fear, stupid. He is a fool. He is incompetent. One would judge his acumen to probably be near the bottom of that of any President of the last 100 years except perhaps (based on what I’ve read) Warren Harding. Think of it: In the 20th century we had men with the intelligence of T.R., Taft, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Clinton. Some of these guys were immoral. Some were duplicitous. Some were unlucky. Some had horridly swollen egos. But were any of them as lacking in acumen as Bush? Were even the ones I haven’t named so lacking in acumen? Ford? Reagan? Coolidge? I don’t think so. And are we really supposed to think Bush is smart because he got whatever grades he did get at Yale or the Harvard Business School, or because his grades apparently were better than those of John Kerry, himself no great brain if you ask me? I don’t think so.

Before New Orleans, there were precious few media people who would say Bush was incompetent. Bob Herbert, Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Derrick Jackson, Eugene Robinson -- I’ve run out of names. After New Orleans it seems like everyone and his brother is saying it, and almost daily too. Even media conservatives like David Brooks are saying the Administration is incompetent. And media types are saying Bush lacked empathy because so many of the people who were suffering were black. (A few years ago one of Bush’s professors was horrified that he could be president; the professor, if I recollect rightly, remembered him as a small-minded punk whose vociferously expressed view was that being poor was entirely the fault of the impoverished (who of course had not had the great good sense to be born a Bush). It is said the boy is father to the man. So too the attitude of the boy seems father to leaving the poor to drown in New Orleans. Not for nothing has Frank Rich recently spoken of "the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions.")

The media is also saying that Bush’s appointees were incompetent regarding New Orleans. Appointees like Michael Brown (Brownie), whose preparation for heading FEMA was ten years of running an Arabian horse association -- a job he apparently got booted from, yet -- and being the assistant to his predecessor, Joe Albaugh, whose own credentials for running FEMA were that he was Bush’s college roommate and a political advisor. Or like Michael Chertoff, who, like a guy named Bybee, was nominated to be a federal judge despite his role in approval of torture, or maybe because of his role in it, and who then was made head of Homeland Security, and who, as with Bybee and Gonzalez too, was approved by a gutless and immoral Congress despite his role in approval of torture.

Permit me a brag now that, after New Orleans, everyone and his brother in the media is saying that Bush and the Administration are incompetent, now that it is being said even by the generally spineless bastards on television and, beyond that, even by conservatives. As indicated, there were precious few media people who said it earlier despite the fiasco in Iraq (a fiasco initially praised, The Times has now publicly admitted, because the embedded media became cheerleaders for the war -- as one would have to expect in the circumstances, including the circumstance that a reporter’s life depended on the troops he or she was embedded with). But this blogger said early-on in the life of this blog that Bush and his buddies were incompetent and kept repeating it and repeating it. That is the brag.

Yet one did not have to be a genius to see the incompetence. You only had to watch -- as Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot just by watching."

Before telling you what could be observed here if you watched, let me first set the stage by telling a related story about Viet Nam.

People sometimes ask this writer why he turned against the Viet Nam War in 1965; they ask what tipped me off pretty much early-on that the war was an unwinnable disaster. The answer was, and is, simple. I read the newspapers. And every week or even every day one read that we were dropping more bombs than ever on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, we were dropping staggering totals on it. But the North Viet Namese, one also read, were infiltrating large and ever increasing numbers of men and amounts of materiel down the trail despite the bombing. When the Government was asked how the Viet Namese could be doing this in spite of the bombing, the only answer it could give, and the one it regularly gave, was that we were making it harder for them. Well, this didn’t translate to victory. It didn’t compute. The North Viet Namese were constantly infiltrating more and more men and materiel despite a bombing campaign of unprecedented ferocity, and all our government could say was that we were making it harder for them? From this it was crystal clear that we were in a disaster. As Yogi said, etc.

To come back to Iraq, before the war Saddam said he had some surprises for us, and then -- very oddly -- his conventional army more or less melted away. What did this mean? Then, on May 1, 2003 I think it was, the fool announced on the Abraham Lincoln that major combat operations were over -- at a time when we probably had suffered only 10 or 20 percent of the combat deaths and injuries we have now suffered. A guerrilla war had started and it grew and grew. We learned that, before we even invaded, Saddam had trained hundreds, maybe thousands, of officers in guerrilla warfare and had stored caches of weapons all over the country. (The media didn’t and still doesn’t talk about the training or the caches. It makes the Administration look too inept. So the media avoids it.) This all made it pretty clear what the melting away of Saddam’s conventional army had meant. And since you can observe a lot if you watch, it became equally clear that Bush -- and his pals Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, etc. -- had gotten us into one hell of a mess.

And then you were able to observe yet more that verified this judgment: the still continuing Humvee foul-up regarding lack of armor, the foul up with reservists and National Guardsmen, the torture. And, as now with New Orleans too, there was also the constant Bushian technique of smooth, optimistic, disingenuous statements that we are winning and will win, that we will obtain "victory" and must not "retreat,"statements just like the ones we used to get about Nam but far more smooth, and cleverly mixed now and again, when Bush thought public opinion demanded it, with platitudinous statements that some bad thing (like torture or "down armored" Humvees) is unacceptable, or we must do better at one thing or another, or we will prevail despite the difficulties. Oh yes: there were, as now with New Orleans, lots of smooth statements, mixed, when public opinion required it, with platitudinous pledges of improvements, while things went to hell in a handbasket. As Berra said, "You can observe a lot just by watching." And one thing you can observe if you watch, as a liberal like Frank Rich and a conservative like David Brooks have both recognized, is sheer ineptitude in both Iraq and New Orleans. Incompetence, like death, does not take a holiday. Nor can political spin make the dead come alive or the incompetent competent.

* * * * *In his life of John Adams, David McCullough wrote that, "having failed at nearly everything else he had ever tried," Adams’ son-in-law, William Smith, had "lately been elected to Congress." That is pretty much the story of George W. Bush. Except that Bush got himself elected Governor and then President. He had been a playboy and a drunk who had to become a fundamentalist -- a right wing nut job? -- in order to straighten out his life, and had been a serial failure in business who repeatedly had to be bailed out by Daddy’s and Granddaddy’s friends and wanna-be-friends. But he got himself elected Governor and President. No other President, I think, had such preparation for the job. Harry Golden would be right, but for the wrong reasons, in saying "Only In America."

But one must give Bush credit. Politics is the family business, the family business to an extent it was for no other family in the last century but the Kennedys, and before that the Adams. It also is preeminently one of the fields where, for nearly 50 years, and in many instances far longer, competence and honesty has not mattered. To the contrary, honesty, competence and morality can be, in fact are, positive hindrances to someone seeking major political office: it is generally thought that people who believe they can be completely honest yet be in politics are deluded fools. Modern politics is also the preeminent business in which the traits needed to reach high top -- here dishonesty, spin meistering, colossal egotism, and at times a nearly utter lack of principle -- virtually ensure that one who reaches high office will be incompetent to do a good job once there.

Recognizing that politics is the family business, and surely aware that the surfeit of right wing fools, including very rich ones, would fall all over themselves trying to help a scion of the Bush family, George Bush understood that he had a future in politics, a future in which he would not even have to serve years of apprenticeship, but could shoot right to the top immediately as first a Governor and then the President. In one sense it can accurately be said that Bush is not to blame for what occurred. For all that he did was to take advantage of the situation as he found it. The deeper question of why our public life is as it is, of why he found it as it was, of why it enables someone like Bush to win the Presidency, is not a question for which Bush bears initiating responsibility or for whose growth he himself bears responsibility except for his conduct since about 1998 or 1999. (Also, the deeper issue is, in its large aspect, separate from the issue of his family’s dynasty. Of course, the family did take advantage of the situation and used it to further its own political and financial ambitions, and to that (not wholly inconsiderable) extent the family and the deeper issue are interlocked.)

The view to be stated here, which goes back at least 45 years, is not one the media or the pols would agree with. The media always takes a very short view of things: it sees things in the context of the last few days or perhaps weeks. Given our recent disasters, a few media people are taking what is for them a long view -- from the time Bush was elected. But the media does not look at history or the seriously long view; as a general rule, not even its truly exceptional and intelligent members do so. The pols follow the media’s lead, and don’t know history besides. The same for the general population, which is subject as well to emotional political enthusiasms of both short and long standing. So one does not expect the view of this writer to be popular, not even if it is completely true. Perhaps especially if it is completely true, since it is in its own way Veblenesque even if its author lacks the brain of a Veblen.

My attitude goes back at least to 1960, when Kennedy made image the summum bonum of public life. Kennedy himself was apparently a reasonably talented man -- and not just in chasing skirts. But in terms of substance achieved his administration was pretty weak. (Some say, of course, that Johnson’ s program was mainly Kennedy’s program achieved. One is dubious that Kennedy would have gotten it through, though. On the other hand, it is at least possible that Kennedy would not have fought a useless major war in Nam.) Weak on substance achieved, Kennedy and his people relied on image both in getting him elected President and as President -- as his people still rely on it in regard to his Administration. And with a focus on image there necessarily came associated braggadocio and immodesty -- you can’t put the focus on image without them.

That was the beginning, I think, of what ultimately occurred in post World War II times. After Kennedy made image all-important, Johnson and Nixon added rampant dishonesty to our political life. Nixon added outright criminality. Ford added not punishing -- instead pardoning -- the guilty. Reagan added rampant greed and economic unfairness as the price of huge economic growth redounding to the vast financial benefit of the upper middle class and the wealthy, while devil take the hindmost -- the poor and the uneducated. By the time Clinton became President, all the rest of these traits were well ensconced in our public life and in our private life too, where especial sway was held by image, dishonesty, and rampant greed. To this already disastrous stew, some of which he used to get elected, Clinton added known immorality. George Bush II then added stupidity and lack of empathy.

Throughout all of this, as honesty took a back seat, competence did likewise. Instead of accomplishing necessary things, politicians talked about them, (as in New Orleans) held press conferences about them, spun about them, lied about them, especially about disastrous events occurring because of lack of competence. Competent people don’t have to lie -- they accomplish. Lying is the handmaiden of incompetence and failure. So Johnson lied about Viet Nam and the economy. Nixon lied about Viet Nam and Watergate. Reagan probably lied about Irangate. Bush I lied about taxes (and some think he likely lied about Irangate too). Clinton lied about Monicagate. George Bush II lied about Iraq.

And the press, which Abraham Lincoln long ago recognized as the most powerful of all forces in influencing the nation, went along with lots of this. Early-on it supported Nam. Early-on it thought Watergate silly. It never did catch on in advance to the savings and loan scandal. It did not assail Reagan very vigorously. It gave Clinton a free pass on immorality in 1991 and 1992. It gave George Bush II a free pass on incompetence, embedded itself in his army in Iraq, and became a cheering section for bushwa and Bush-wa. It took the New Orleans disaster for TV newsmen to finally start saying publicly that all the pols ever do is talk, instead of accomplishing what needs to be done. (Even some local pols began saying the same things (in strident language) -- but about the national pols, of course. And then some national pols turned on the local ones or on each other.)

And, as this now-45-year-old trend became ever bigger and more pervasive in both public and private life, it was augmented, justified, pushed ahead by well funded conservative think tanks who taught judges, economists, pols, TV journalists and other molders of opinion that uncabined greed is good, that fairness leads to economic damnation, that America’s goal should be to remake the world, by military force if needed. These people’s highly financed push for a reactionary revolution -- not a conservative one, a reactionary one -- succeeded beyond the wildest imaginations of the alarmists of 1964 who thought Goldwater’s massive defeat meant the end of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that? -- the end of the Republican Party. And what did the Democrats offer in response? Pretty much nothing. Except, perhaps, for Viet Nam, wild-eyed inflation in the 1970s and more of the throw-money-at-the-problem economic policies that people were rejecting.

In the course of all this, the country simply swept under the rug, ignored, implicitly said to hell with problems that were festering and that came back, or are coming back, to bite us in the posterior parts. The problem of racial inequality: often ignored. The problem of class: totally ignored (as for much or even most of American history). The now 30 year old history of the average working stiff being unable to keep up in his income, while for most of that period the well-off became ever more well off: totally ignored. The threat posed by fanatical Islamism rampant: totally ignored until 9/11. (Ironically, and almost totally unknown, 9/11 is also a great day in American history because on September 11, 1786 a group of delegates met in an Annapolis conference that is issued a call for what became the constitutional convention.) The fact that Congress has for over 40 years declined to address what Viet Nam and Iraq show, 40 years apart, to be perhaps the major post World War II problem of American life, the problem that leads to so many others -- that is, the fact that Congress has declined to address the transfer of the decision on war from Congress to the President, a transfer that is directly contrary to the wishes of the framers who Bush and his crowd love to cite in pursuit of specious "originalism" and who dreaded lodging the war deciding power in the Executive because history taught them that he is far too likely to make war for light or bad reasons and to thereby create havoc in his own country: largely ignored. The fact that so much of value in American life was being lost, including what the Europeans call solidarity, while every man engaged in a selfishness-and/or greed-based Hobbesean struggle of all against all in which success, however shoddily or illegitimately obtained, was the only god and was all that mattered -- not honesty, not competence, not fairness, not morality, but only success: totally ignored in private life until disaster struck in the early 2000s due to uncabined greed and reform was consequently demanded, and totally ignored to this day in public life. The problem of potentially loose nukes by the thousands in Russia, which if they ever got loose (so to speak) might make us wish for the good old days of a "mere" hurricane and flooding in New Orleans and elsewhere: too much, though not wholly, ignored. Environmental threats that can lead to disasters like that which has now struck New Orleans: downplayed, ignored, starved of remedial funds. The inevitable shortages of energy supplies that we have been warned of for decades and that have now led to gasoline prices of nearly $3.50 to $4.00 per gallon (or even more): downplayed as much as the powers that be could get away with.

What we have seen in the public life of this country in the last 45 years, and at times in private life too, is an ongoing, ever-increasing systemic failure. Image became more important by far than competence and achievement; dishonesty, spin meistering and outright lies replaced honesty; fairness and reasonable efforts at coming closer to equality went out the window; and government promoted uncabined, unalloyed greed as supposedly beneficial. This congeries is systemic failure. What else could it be called in a country that thinks itself decent?

This writer certainly does not expect widespread, or even any, agreement with this view. It is a view which hits too many people where they live. It hits them where they live regardless of whether they are in public life or, as true of most folks, are simply in private life. It would be resisted to the nth degree even if it were empirically provable beyond peradventure rather than being a matter of opinion. But call my confidence in the view conceit if you want. Call my view overwrought because of the various good things that occurred in the last 45 years (winning the Cold War without a (once barely escaped) nuclear holocaust, the increase in the rights and status of women, gays and minorities, the increase in the overall gross domestic product). Call the view one-sided if you want. Call it thick headed obduracy if you want. Call it whatever you want, I nonetheless do remain confident that systemic failure is how historians are most likely to see the matter a hundred years from now. Just as historians finally saw, admitted, and wrote the truth about why the South fought the Civil War -- to save slavery -- after 110 years and more of successful Southern propaganda to the contrary, so too historians of the long distant future, from whose eyes the scales will have been removed by time, will see and say that from 1960 to 2005 there was a systemic failure involving lack of honesty, lack of competence, societal unfairness, and greed unalloyed with considerations of the general welfare.

* * * * *

Those of us who have been adults from the beginning of the Kennedy Administration to the current time of the Bush II Administration have been subjected to the Chinese curse: we have lived in interesting times. It is true that much is better today than in 1960: as indicated, lots of African Americans have it better today, women do, gays do. There is more consciousness about the environment, about the disastrousness of war (if not about how to stop war). Food is better. Healthcare is better for lots, though not all. But the problems, almost all agree, remain immense. Such is the nature of the human condition, it seems. One problem, if resolved, is always replaced by another, conceivably even more threatening one, as the end of the Cold War was replaced by the problem of fundamentalist Islamism rampant.

One thing that I think can fairly be said, however, is that dishonesty, stupidity, incompetence and a lack of any sense of the other guy can make a given problem worse -- viz. Viet Nam and Iraq -- and can lead to new problems -- viz. Iraq seems to have geometrically increased the number of Muslims who desire to act against the United States. And today we already are long into an era in which dishonesty, incompetence, unconcern for the other fellow, arrogance and greed have become the American way in public affairs. This, systemic failure is not the cruise that most of us signed up for. Call us relics of the 1960s if you wish, but we signed on for a very different cruise, one in which decency prevailed, not its opposite. And the question now is, what if anything can be done to straighten out what Longfellow called the ship of state.

The platitudinous answer that is usually given is to get involved in public life. Yet a major problem has long been that the best people, the ones who are honest, the ones who are truly competent and therefore don’t need to spin and lie to cover up failure, don’t want anything to do with politics as they are practiced today. Politics today are too dirty, too much the playground of the sleazy, inept and unprincipled. The truly honest and competent generally prefer to make their lives on the private side, where they can succeed without becoming sleazes, where they can achieve instead of just talking. They want no part of either of our two major political parties, which they see as being in many ways just Tweedledum and Tweedledee. (Not in all ways but in enough ways, e.g., the constant sucking after money and after the rich who can give it to them, and the consequent protection of interests of the rich.)

But what if a new party were to arise, just as the Republicans arose in 1854 to resolve the fundamental schism then besetting the country? What if there were to be a new party whose lived-by creed were to be demands for honesty and competence, demands for fairness, and demands for intelligent respectful discussion of the pros and cons of courses of action in order to come as close as we can to decency? Would such a party automatically be rejected? Automatically be a failure? Yellow dog Democrats will horrifiedly tell you that such a new party would simply assure future conservative Republican hegemony (as Ralph Nader is accused of doing and, if memory serves, George Wallace too). Maybe so. But then again, maybe not. Maybe such a new party would attract the decent elements from the Republican Party, not just from the Democratic Party. Maybe it would attract to politics decent elements who have forborne to associate themselves with either of the two current major parties because they both are so morally corrupt.

There are other countries that successfully have had or still have three or more parties. There have also been times when this country has had three parties because of demands for reform. Our likely cockamamie winner-take-all election system has not always meant, and need not necessarily mean, that there inevitably must be only two parties and that they must always be the same two.

Who knows? Maybe it is time, even long past time, to start talking about a third party. Maybe it is time to start talking about a party that could draw the decent people of society because it stands for and practices the decent values of society -- and won’t deserve to exist if it doesn’t practice them. One thing is for sure, though. If people don’t start thinking and talking about a third party based on fundamental decency, we’ll never know if one could be formed, if it could be successful, or even if it could "merely" have a wholesome influence on the two present, morally and intellectual corrupt major parties because of their fear of its potential success. Nor, given a systemic trend that is now 45 years old, will we be able to expect, unless we start thinking and talking about a third party, that old fashioned virtues like honesty, competence, achievement and fairness will come back to replace the dishonesty, incompetence, mere talk and unfairness that currently are the prevailing ethos of public life.*

*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

About Dean Velvel

Name:Lawrence
Velvel

Location:Andover, Massachusetts,
United States

Dean Velvel, an honors graduate of
the University of Michigan Law School, has practiced law in the public and private sectors,
and been a law professor. He is the author of the quartet Thine Alabaster Cities
Gleam. The books in the quartet are entitled: Misfits In America, Trail of
Tears, The Hopes and Fears of Future Years: Loss and Creation, and The Hopes
and Fears of Future Years: Defeat and Victory.

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